Digital Refugees

From The Atlantic on the legacy of Mary Oliver

“Reading in Age of Constant Distraction” (The Paris Review). I love what he says here about the difference between intensive and extensive reading as well as vertical and horizontal reading. Wow. That’s good.

Cal Newport, “Steve Jobs Never Wanted Us to Use our Phones Like This” (NYT).This is a great little article on what it looks like to move our phones away from “constant companions” back into the Jobs’ original vision for them. As he says, “The iPhone is a fantastic phone, but it was never meant to be the foundation for a new form of existence in which the digital increasingly encroaches on the analog.”

“Digital Addiction Getting You Down: Try an Analog Cure,” NYT

She’s exploring the present and future of what she calls a “genie in a speaker.” Lots of money and research is going into making them better. What will happen to silence? What will happen to conversations with real humans? What will happen when thought is eliminated from consumption?

Filling the Silence with Digital Noise. We’re less and less capable of simply sitting in silence and/or doing nothing. They link it to something called the “vortex phenomenon,” which is a great phrase.

What technology has to do with the creation mandate.

Thomas Plante, a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University, says that chefs are going to have more luck using carrots than sticks if they’re hoping to dial back diners’ smartphone usage. “If they present it in a fun way, so that it’s reinforcing [the behavior], it could be a trend that people get on top of,” Plante says. “A lot of people know they’re addicted to phones, they know it is a problem, but they need structures in place to help them cope.”

As YouTube became the world’s babysitter—an electronic pacifier during trips, or when adults are having dinner—parents began to seek out videos that soaked up more time. So nowadays what’s most popular on Toddler YouTube are not three-minute songs, but compilations that last 30 to 45 minutes, or even longer.

They speak to a primal set of basic impulses—to world-creating, skill-building, achievement, violence, leadership, teamwork, speed, efficiency, status, decision-making and accomplishment.

“On winter nights, the white-noise app on my phone is tuned to Air Conditioner: a raspy, metallic whir that sounds like the mechanical noise that might echo deep inside the ductwork of a huge commercial building. (Among the app’s other offerings are Dishwasher Rinsing, Crowded Room and Vacuum Cleaner.)”

In a sense, this is where Digital Refugees end up. It’s the extreme reaction to the current digital experience. They’re reading Ted Kaczynski (the unabomber) and they’re having their own moment.

“Merton lived the public world, the world of words and politics, but knew that living in it had killed him. (“Thomas Merton is dead.”) He sought the peace of pure and silent contemplation, but came to believe that the value of that experience is to send us back into the world that killed us. He is perhaps the proper patron saint of our information-saturated age, of we who live and move and have our being in social media, and then, desperate for peace and rest, withdraw into privacy and silence, only to return. As we always will.”

It’s about who mom who can feel that awkward distance growing between her and her daughter as she becomes a teenager. Yet, it’s through her Instagram that she’s able to see what her daughter is like.

It’s asking questions about whether VR church is crossing some kind of line and ending up somewhere other than church. Is there something to being embodied that has to do with what it means to be the church?

Will there be an “Amish impulse” for digital natives? What will it look like in practice? How far will people go to get away from phones?

From David Brooks at the NYT